Our First Million

My brothers and I were good capitalists.  Or at least we had fond hopes of being good capitalists someday.  At the time, the best you really could have said of us was that we were good capitalists in training. 


We grew up at a time when that was rather counterculture here in the California.  At least for capitalists.


The upcoming generation at the time was pretty anti.  Anti most everything that existed to be honest, but especially anti-capitalism.  In their minds, capitalism was the root of all evil.  Never mind they drove a car to school that had been made by an evil corporation; or that school was paid for by taxes gleaned from business; or that their parents were using money they earned to pay for Spring Break. 

Nope, that generation knew that capitalism was wrong, right up until the 1980's when they became the "Me Generation".

But at the time I was Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll; Oh, and Free Love; and all that went with it.  And let’s be honest, if sex isn’t selling….what will?

 

But my brothers and I were too young then to understand all of that, and so, we were wrapped up in dreams and schemes to make our first million. 

We mowed lawns, peddled papers, pushed brooms, and weeded gardens.  Anything and everything to earn some extra money.

We did live pretty careful as a family when it came to spending money.  And all in all that was a good thing.  Now, I’m not trying to say that we were poor, ‘cause we weren’t.  I have known a whole mess of folks that had a lot less than we had.  I’ve known some few that had a lot more too. 

And given the choice of staying where we were; of losing ground; or of gaining a few dollars, that was a simple enough call.  And if all it was gonna take was a bit of extra working, well , heck, we had dug plenty of holes and such so….my brothers and I were up for it.

 

And so, regardless of the “anti crowd”, and like any budding capitalists, we boys were always looking for opportunities to earn some more money.  Because we knew that while you could work for the other guy and do well, if you really wanted to make some real money; if your goal was to become a millionaire, then you were gonna have to take some risk and go into business for yourself.

By the later part of the 1960’s the use of anti-venom to treat snake bite had been well established.  But it was new news to us boys.  We went to studying on it.  We knew we lived in hot dry country.  And we knew that the hills outside of town had rattlesnakes.  And we knew that if those snakes were caught, they could be milked for their venom and that could be used to treat snake bite.  Not that we understood how, but we knew that the doctors needed real snake venom to start.

So, we spent a couple days figuring out how to make snake loops.  A snake loop is basically a long stick with a cord that runs through a few eyes screwed into the stick and one end of the cord fastened down.  If you pulled some slack into the bottom end, you have a loop coming off of the pole.  Our plan was to slip up on a snake, drop the loop over its head, pull the cord tight trapping the snake, pick it up, and deposit it into a gunny sack.

And though my brother’s tried hard, I wasn’t dumb enough to let them practice their “catchin” on my big toes.  Heck, I knew how much hurt you could put on a big toe by yanking it the wrong direction. 


I’d won a number of fights with my eldest brother using that move. 

Anyway, after what I can best refer to as some spirited conversation, it was decided to use some bent sticks on the ground to practice on.

We then gave some thought to protecting our feet and ankles from snake bites.

We did that for self-preservation.

You see, since we were confident that doctors would willingly pay us for the snakes we caught, then we really had to have a basic belief that there wasn’t enough anti-venom to go around. 

And while we may not have been the sharpest knives in the drawer, we were able to figure out that the goal was to catch the snake in some manner that didn’t include getting small holes punched in our hides.

 

Armed with snake sticks and gunny sacks we packed up lunches and headed for the hills.  We stomped up and down a lot of hills that day.  Didn’t find any rattlesnakes. 

We caught some nice gopher snakes, but never had heard of anti-venom for them.

I don’t remember ever going out again. 

Maybe that's because we were not as committed to capitalism as we had thought.

Or maybe we found a new way to sneak into the gravel pits to do some swimming, fishing, or frog gigging. 

Maybe a lot of things. 

But most likely it was simply that we had ADD and had forgotten all about catching and selling snakes by the following day.

 

All in all, it was probably a pretty good thing; cause I know that if we had kept at it, we would have caught us a rattler or two sooner or later. 

And the problem with that as I recall was that our whole sales and marketing plan consisted of carrying our loaded gunnysacks into the hospital………

 

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